Fanfare for National Public Radio

4/18/2017

Aaron Copland died on Dec. 2, 1990.

We were driving north from Florida to New York on one of those all-nighters we used to pull.

As we drove through coastal Georgia and South Carolina, we listened to works by the great American composer, plus critiques of his career.

Past Brunswick, past Savannah, past Charleston, the radio played ballet scores like "Billy the Kid" and "Rodeo" and "Appalachian Spring" as well as concert pieces like "El Salón Mexico" and "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Lincoln Portrait."

When one station crackled out, just a slight adjustment produced another station, somewhere from 88 to 91 on the FM dial. All that evening, we scarcely missed a note of Copland’s musical references to cowboys and immigrants and martyred heroes.

We were connected to the culture of our entire country, not just Big Town but all the places where classical music touches the heart, the brain, the soul.

I count 17 NPR stations in Georgia and eight in South Carolina.

We know this country well enough to realize that it’s not all political bombast and preachers and country music and rock. As we drove north, in the regional cities and small towns and way out in the counties, people were driving or reading or even falling asleep to the work of the master from Boys High in Brooklyn, who never attended college but instead composed music.

This synchronized symphony along Interstate 95 was no accident. It came through a chain of National Public Radio stations, bringing classical music and news and features to all the people and subsidized in part by tax money, via public officials who have recognized, over the years, that pipers (and composers) must be paid.

Now National Public Radio is under siege, its subsidies threatened. The new regime seems to regard enlightened talk and classical music to be frivolous, even seditious.

In New York, we read that subsidies by wealthy and middle class patrons may keep our two radio stations going.

This means we can count on Brian Lehrer switching intellectual gears every weekday morning on WNYC-FM; we can expect Terrance McKnight to keep on playing his eclectic swath of classical music on WQXR-FM.

We’ll be all right. But in so many other places, the high end of talk and music is threatened.

There are worse things, more dangerous things, worth hectoring your local member of Congress. But In the midst of all the other causes, people need to stand up for National Public Radio, all over this land.

Not by Accident

Joshua Rubin

4/18/2017 04:42:27 pm

This saddens me deeply. I more or less lived at my college radio station for four years (not an NPR station), and I interned for a month at KANZ-FM near Garden City, Kansas. That station is now the High Plains Public Radio network, and covers large swaths of western Kansas, Nebraska, the Oklahoma panhandle, and bits of Texas and eastern Colorado. It provides a tremendous cultural and informational resource to those areas, and stations like these will be the hardest hit by cuts.

http://hppr.org/topic/hppr-history (how they started -- I interned when it was still one station in an abandoned elementary school in a hamlet of about 30 houses)

http://hppr.org/hppr-stations-coverage (map of where they cover)

http://hppr.org/schedule/week (what they air)

I would say the effort to cut this funding is shortsighted but that gives too much credit to the intention. the intent is to isolate people and limit the independent flow of news,information, and culture.

George Vecsey

4/18/2017 07:37:26 pm

Josh: absolutely. Culture is suspect; reporting is downright dangerous. i think of Obama's glee at being around scientists and artists. How far we have fallen. G

Brian Savin

4/19/2017 07:19:10 am

Copeland and NPR. Fascinating......

In the early 70's, when I was in law school, on a Saturday afternoon I believe, I was walking past DAR Constitution Hall on Lincoln's Birthday and a poster caught my eye that read: "Portrait of Lincoln, today" It was being performed by the Army Corp orchestra and in very small letters it said "conductor, Aaron Copeland." It also said, "FREE." I looked at my watch and saw the performance was in 20 minutes, I went in and sat down.

I had had some interesting conversations about Copeland with an old family friend, who was a composer, and to see this man in person was irresistible. I will never forget him, or the Lt. Colonel whose narration convinced me I was hearing the voice of God.

When I graduated, I went off to Wall Street but a good friend and member of our study group, Ernie, stayed in Washington and took a newly created job: General Counsel of National Public Radio. Ernie was a radio announcer in college and had a voice that would give that Lt. Colonel a run for his money.

Years later, my old composer friend, Fred, was set to record some just composed songs in NYC's Town Hall. The day the recording session was to take place, Ernie called me to say he was in town and ask whether we could get together. I told Ernie about my event and said Fred needed a narrator, would he do it? Sure, was my friend's reply. Copeland was in the conversation.

So there you have it, George, Copeland and NPR, and the world goes round.... Thanks so much for the memories! (Don't send me a bill for the therapy you just gave me!)

George Vecsey

4/19/2017 09:47:41 am

Brian, hey, you added to my education about TR. Thanks again.

complicated history of Constitution Hall, involving Marian Anderson.
She was rebuffed in 1939 (various versions of why) and many years later she sang there, I believe, six times. Never been. Imagine walking in and seeing Aaron Copland in person. GV

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/18/arts/fresh-perspectives-on-the-dar-s-rebuff-of-marian-anderson.html?pagewanted=all

Alan Rubin link

4/21/2017 11:36:28 am

I was fortunate to have lived and worked in the same zip code as Symphony Space, a true cultural gem. My business gave significant support during their very difficult start up years.

One evening was a birthday celebration for Aaron Copland and the focus was on how the music sound track enhanced a movie. An extremely remarkable evening.

Another time I was invited to an afternoon with the American Symphony orchestra for young children. They were exposed to the inner workings of an orchestra.

The highlight of the afternoon was when several children were given a baton an told to conduct the orchestra. The sound lowered if an arm went down. The speed also changed with arm movements.

The kids did not want to leave.

We have all witnessed people of all ages influenced by the arts.

Why is the arts and culture a seem to be a threat to so many people?

Brian Savin

4/21/2017 07:31:24 pm

Alan, I don't know Symphony Space, but I did know the Thalia very well, which was either close, or the same location. I lived on W 94th. and CPW was just Columbia Grammar School away. Where was your shop? I remember a kosher butcher at Broadway and 100th Street. My Father's mother always bought kosher poultry because she said that were the only thing even close to her European memories. When I moved back to NY I wanted to throw a party for my family. I prepared a turkey from that kosher butcher shop that my family declared was the best they ever had. (I won't pay YOU for the therapy you give me, either, but thanks so much for jogging wonderful memories!)

Ed Martin

4/22/2017 01:36:20 pm

What a pleasure to read an ode to Aaron Copeland and NPR. The Barbarians are not at the gate, they are in the White House, literally! From Venice, Florida to Magog, Quebec, our annual migration, we listen to NPR almost every inch of the way. If anyone is as old as dirt, in the mid 1950s NBC had a weekend program, Monitor, a fore-runner of "magazine" programming-NPR. First heard Bob and Ray on it while driving from NY to Tuscaloosa, (episodically, that is.) "Fanfare for..."

George Vecsey

4/23/2017 09:11:12 pm

Ed, I remember Monitor. I've taken some epic drives with 50,000 clear channel stations on AM at night -- Marshalltown, Iowa. WSM in Nashville. New Orleans at dawn after Mardi Gras, while driving across Tennessee to Kentucky. Easier to finagle the dial on old radios -- harder to do with digital (all or nothing). Funny dead spot for NPR east of Harrisburg PA to Central NJ. on route 78/ But a Quebec station comes in fine. Go figure. GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Fanfare for National Public Radio

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